Canine-Like Steer Wins Top Honors at Fair

Every day for the past 17 months, Tabetha Parrish has fed Thumper, bathed him, played in his pen and taken him for walks.

It’s no wonder the 1,100-pound steer now suffers from a bit of an identity crisis.

“He thinks he’s a dog,” said Tabetha, 16, petting her 1 1/2-year-old Herford with its milk-chocolate coat. “He chases cars, bicycles. If it moves, he chases it.”

But on Friday, it was finally time for this bulky bovine to wake up and smell the steak sauce.

Crowned the grand champion steer at the Ventura County Fair earlier this week, Thumper fetched a steep $6.25 a pound at Friday’s livestock auction for being what he really is--beef.

As the auctioneer’s voice crescendoed unintelligibly, Tabetha, a Santa Paula resident and a six-year veteran of the Fillmore 4-H Club, escorted her winning--and suddenly very valuable--”baby” back to his pen.

“You know that you are special, don’t you?” Tabetha said, nuzzling a somewhat dazed Thumper. “I don’t think I could get any happier than right now.”

It was a 4-H fest, and the moment of reckoning for the hundreds of youngsters and some 390 farm animals including pigs, goats, chickens and sheep. Potential buyers jammed a fairgrounds pavilion to bid on some of the best and shapeliest livestock in the county.

Like many of the 4-H members here, Tabetha said she never forgot that the animal she nurtured and pampered was always a market animal and never a pet. “That’s what he was raised for.”

Tabetha plans to put most of the money from the sale--more than $6,000--into her college fund.

Fellow 4-H member J. P. Pecht was hanging out in a shaded pen with his two lambs, Brie and Togo. The 16-year-old Oxnard resident was waiting to put Togo, a Suffolk sheep, up for auction.

“Brie is a little more stubborn,” said J. P., a Las Posas 4-H member, comparing the animals’ personalities. “When I walk her she pulls back, but she doesn’t buck or anything.”

Though J. P. plans to show Brie, a breeding sheep, in next year’s competition, he said down the line, it is law, not agriculture, that holds more allure.

“I don’t think I would like to do it [livestock raising] as a career,” J. P. said.

During Friday’s auction, volunteers roved through the crowd passing out cubes of grilled steak, a foretaste perhaps of what being the highest bidder could bring. And several spectators wore T-Shirts that read “Save a Cow, Eat a Vegetarian.” It was, all in all, a decidedly meat-friendly crowd.

“There are not a whole lot of vegetarians who do this,” said Craig Fosdick, the fair’s superintendent of large livestock. “These are mostly ranchers and dirt kickers.”